Essays & Ideas
A Collection
of Propositions
These are not positions. They are proposals — structures through which a subject might be examined rather than verdicts about it.
Each essay begins from somewhere and tries to end somewhere further along. Whether it arrives is a matter for the reader. The author may have changed his mind between the first sentence and the last, and probably has since.
The ideas collected here are offered as ideas: worth entertaining, worth testing, worth discarding if the evidence demands it. Agreement is neither sought nor assumed. Disagreement, if it is precise, is welcome.
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There Is Nothing New
On software's infinite regress, and how the industry sells the same ideas to each generation under a different name
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The Ledger That Forgot Its Name
On double-entry bookkeeping, event sourcing, and the software industry's habit of rediscovering the fifteenth century
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The Cells That Ate the Program
On object-orientation's biological promise, its philosophical betrayal, and why the industry is quietly dismantling what it spent thirty years building
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The Quiet Colossus
On Ada, the language the Department of Defense built, the industry ignored, and every modern language quietly became
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The Mutual Deception
On the coevolution of C and x86-64, the billion-transistor fiction at the heart of modern computing, and why the compiler was always smarter than the programmer
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There Are No Bugs
On what the industry's favourite word conceals, and what it costs